COMMENT
"Whatever were you doing at that neoconservative con–
ference in Washington, D.C. last weekend?" one of my American
leftist friends asked me, soon after my arrival in Vienna, last Oc–
tober 19th. That I attended the Second Thoughts Conference seemed
to be a transgression . "Others may do what they want," my friend
had admonished me when he thought I had digressed once before,
"but you, as a representative of
Partisan Review,
have a reputation to
uphold ."
I, however, perceive my role as that of a liberal defender of
democratic freedoms, and as such prefer to keep my eye on what I
consider the excesses on both right and left, and on the consequences
that American rhetoric and policy have for the rest of the world .
Thus, I went to this conference because the "Second Thoughters"–
invited by two former leaders of the sixties movement, David Horo–
witz and Peter Collier-promised to provide a forum that would
span the political spectrum.
Those who attended the conference knew that the panelists'
politics, for the most part, had moved away from their radical
stances in the 1960s. Collier and Horowitz asked them to recount
why and how this had happened; at what moments they had come to
and then given up "the self-aggrandizing romance with corrupt
Third Worldism; the casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism; the
hypocritical and self-dramatizing anti-Americanism." Still, if the
panels were not balanced, the invited audience included many
leading leftists.
Lloyd Billingsly started off by saying that he originally had
found the rhetoric of the left to square with his social vision of Chris–
tianity, with helping one's neighbor, but that after the bloodbath in
Cambodia, he thought the United States, in spite of all its flaws, of–
fered the best chances for freedom. Peter Collier remembered that
he would have stayed on the left, if only the movement had been
willing to recognize "that there were more people killed during the
first two years of the communist peace than in all of the anticommu–
nist wars." For Jeffrey Herf, "the issues came to a head in the debates
about medium-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe ... [when
he] was convinced that further deterioration of the balance of forces
in Europe would eventually lead to an American withdrawal and
subsequent neutralization and/or Soviet hegemony over Western
Europe." David Horowitz said he gave up when he found out that
